Review Article White Writing and Postcolonial Politics CHERRY CLAYTON I^^ADINE GORDiMER and J. M. Coetzee are probably the two most widely known and internationally acclaimed white South African writers, representing to world opinion, judging by the prizes they have received (the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gordimer in 1991 and the Jerusalem Prize to Coetzee in 1987 being only two of the most prestigious), voices of conscience and integrity within the developing and turbulent politics of South Africa. They have been involved also in continuing debates, conducted partly with each other by way of polemic and fiction, about the nature and significance of intellectual activity and novel writing during the changing decades of repression and resistance.2 During the 1970s and 1980s a wide range of critical responses to their work, both South African and international (and partly determined by their respective locations in these two critical communities), arose in the process of the professionaliza- tion of Southern African critical debates and their progressive interlocking (and disagreement) with international theoretical models of postmodernism and postcolonialism.3 Coetzee, in par• ticular, seemed to be welcomed into an international critical community nourished by the same poststructuralist critics and linguists who appeared to form an intellectual substructure for his fiction or to provide appropriate tools for its analysis (see Dovey). Here, at last, was a writer from South Africa on whom Lacanian analysis would not be wasted! Gordimer's international reception has always been more clearly marked by the liberal humanism within which she seemed to locate herself, as the title of her volume of nonfiction, The Essential Gesture, indicates. She has spoken often, in her ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 25:4, October 1994 154 CHERRY CLAYTON occasional nonfiction and public speeches, in terms of commit• ments, as a writer and a citizen, as if those commitments could be unproblematically made by a white intellectual and as if those two commitments existed on the same plane. Coetzee has been much more apt to speak in terms of privacy and freedom, espe• cially the freedom not to be drawn into the intellectual laagers set up by contesting critical paradigms, whether South African or international, or, more simply, the power politics that have riven the South African scene and are refracted through academic life and criticism. Michael K is a not-too-distant relative of Coetzee's. Coetzee guards his privacy and the sources of his writing, despite his gradually more revealing interviews. In his interviews he has disclaimed the right to representative "committed" action or writing on behalf of anyone else in South Africa; the project of his fiction has been to explore the difficulties of any such gesture in South Africa or of any representation of otherness in any situa• tion of power imbalance. Coetzee's fiction and criticism (his most important nonfiction is collected with a telling sequence of interviews by David Attwell in Doubling the Point) conduct a run• ning debate with history, as oppressive fact and as discourse, whereas Gordimer's argument (at least in terms of public dis• course) has been conducted more literally and specifically in terms of her generation's political opposition to the South Afri• can state, the Nationalist Party, and apartheid. This difference is partly generational: Gordimer was born in ig23 and has drawn her literary inspiration from Eastern Euro• pean dissident thinkers (in a kind of intellectual acknowledg• ment of her otherwise elusive Jewish inheritance) and short-story writers such as Katherine Mansfield, though from the first the economic imbalances of the country and the specifically racial prejudices and fears of white South Africa formed the crux of her short stories. Coetzee, born in 1940, is a highly trained linguist whose specialized scholarship, including early studies in maths and computer science, has shaped both his syntax and his over• riding interest in language as phenomenon, as an endless but problematic resource, as a cultural barrier and as a site where privilege and power are deeply inscribed, especially in South Africa. Beckett and Kafka have been returning and powerful WHITE WRITING AND POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS 155 presences in his fictions, shaping as they have our modern and postmodern awareness that alienation from self is an inseparable part of alienation from the simple exercise of political authority.4 As is so often the case, an added twist occurs in the South African context, where there has been so much abuse of secrecy and surveillance. The South African scene was ripe for Coetzee's applications of the European absurdist fable to colonialism. Attwell has pointed out that Coetzee is also a regional writer, and his "region," though more or less transmuted in each fic• tive terrain, is the Cape Province, including the Karoo, which he de-mythologizes, or re-mythologizes, in In The Heart of the Country. Gordimer was born in a small mining town on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal, and her maturation accompan• ied the key clashes ofjohannesburg liberalism and underground black struggle with the era of high apartheid and social engineer• ing. As Stephen Clingman's book-length study charted, there has been no better guide to the social and inner life of decades of South African history (and to what Rowland Smith has called the 'Johannesburg Genre") than Gordimer. The politicization of her heroines has represented a fictional refraction of her own (see Driver). Coetzee was born in the Cape Province and has made Cape Town his home: that windy island (peninsula) that seems so abstractly rendered in the literary territory of the open• ing pages of Foe is also recognizably Cape Town, and some of his most intimate effects involve the recognition of a known and loved landscape as well as the speech habits of the people who live there. He is not only regional; he presents a love of particular regions, in his character Michael K, for instance, as a humanizing though ineffectual bulwark against the dehumanization of racial politics. He knows (and loves) Afrikaans (and Dutch) in a way Gordimer does not. Both Coetzee and Gordimer have multiple, overlapping cultural and ethnic affiliations and disaffiliations that are nevertheless contained at another level by their South Africanness (and yet a South Africanness constituted, until now, by the experience of living within a white minority holding vast power and privilege over a disenfranchised black majority). Coetzee, who tends to be assimilated to a renegade Afrikaner modelled by Brink and Breytenbach, grew up in an English- 156 CHERRY CLAYTON speaking home (Coetzee, Doubling the Point 341-42), though some of his obsessive fictional mapping of early South African exploration in Dusklands must have its roots in a shared family tree, and even the intimacy of the hatred expressed by Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron for the "boars" as patriarchal master race seems to stem from a disenchanted but knowledgeable des• cendant (in that sense the model of the renegade Afrikaner has some truth). In the Heart of the Country reveals that Coetzee knows about the Afrikaner master/servant relationship on South African farms, and the Oedipal tensions they carry, in a way that Gordimer does not, though her portrait of Johannesburg madam/male servant in July's People, and in many short stories, shows us what she knows inimitably well. It is not, of course, the South Africanness of Coetzee and Gordimer that is at issue in many of the critical debates, but rather their whiteness and privilege within a political configura• tion that has so radically, until very recently, dispossessed and silenced a black majority. What right have they had to speak at all for those debarred from speech, if they have so spoken? And even if that very privileging has been their subject, as it has, has not their international fame and the thoroughness of their criti• cal reception replicated their national situation internationally, ensconcing them ever more completely in the trappings of medi• ating liberal spokesmanship and cultural value? Are there not deserving and valid black (and "Coloured") viewpoints that are not being as widely articulated, circulated, and listened to? The current moment seems a good one in which to ask such questions and to recognize that there has been a certain self-confirming, circular relationship between white intellectual privilege in South Africa and an educated international public anxious to align itself with the voices of conscience emerging from a dark continent or a "police state." It is hard not to notice that all of the critics in the two volumes under review are white. And yet no one would wish to be without the literary testimony offered during decades of change by two such humane and intelligent writers from South Africa and by the increasingly sophisticated and humane critical responses they have called forth. They have themselves charted "from the inside," to echo Stephen Cling- WHITE WRITING AND POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS 157 man's subtitle, the many sociopolitical shifts that have eventually precipitated a new order, have made the ambiguities of the white relationship to that process their subject, and, more so in the case of Coetzee, part of narrative process and a questioning of textuality itself. Moreover, international perceptions and images of South Africa have been created largely by Gordimer and Coetzee (as well as André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach, on a more sensationalist level) for an educated public, and the stim• ulus this might have given to economic and other sanctions (which undoubtedly played their part in bringing down the old order) was a political intervention hard to measure. Thus it seems important to ask how the by-now considerable oeuvres of these two white writers have affected and shaped national and international perceptions of a country so recently in the world spotlight when a major and long overdue shift in power occurred.